This week, CloudHealth Technologies announced that we are officially entering the multi-cloud era with support for multiple public cloud service providers, including Microsoft Azure. What do you get when you use CloudHealth for Microsoft Azure? I’ve outlined below some of the key benefits customers get when they use CloudHealth.
Visibility into all subscriptions, cost centers and enrollments
Keeping track of everything that happens in your cloud across every department, team, and project is incredibly complex. First of all, even with a strong tagging policy, it can be hard to break out spend, usage, and performance by cost code, making it nearly impossible to hold departments responsible for their consumption. CloudHealth provides customers with a single pane of glass to view and analyze all activity across Azure (and other clouds) from a business perspective. We do this by allowing you to create business-level groups that align to whatever makes sense in your organization–whether it’s test, dev, and prod, or projects A-Z, or by application. You set these up as dynamic rule-based groupings of tags and metadata, and the downstream dependent resources will map automatically and stay continuously updated. Use these groupings for any report and analysis throughout the CloudHealth platform.
The result: Keep your Azure environment aligned to business metrics and objectives.
Access to burndown reports to track spend versus commit
Today, most Azure customers purchase capacity through an Enterprise Agreement–at the beginning of the year, they will commit to an amount they will spend in Azure. Tracking burndown is key, since Microsoft allows you to change your commit amount at certain intervals, if you are over-, or under-spending your forecast. The CloudHealth Burndown report for Azure gives just that: a report that tracks burndown versus commit, which you can subscribe to anyone in your organization, whether or not they have access to the EA portal, or even have an Azure login. What’s even better is you can forecast out your future spend based on your historical spend, so you can project when, and if, you will exceed your commitment.
The result: Ensure you have the right amount in your Azure commitment so you always get the best possible discounts.
Recommendations for virtual machine (VM) rightsizing
After you’ve mastered cost and usage reporting and analysis, it’s time to turn to performance. Understanding performance in a meaningful way across your environment, can be a daunting task. Some of my colleagues recently pointed out that Azure provides an extremely rich set of metrics on VM performance on a micro-level, but correlating and analyzing that data on a macro level so you can use it for decision-making is key. CloudHealth provides performance reports that can help you understand VM performance across CPU, disk, memory, and network, and view these across any dimension in your environment. The analysis comes in the Azure VM Rightsizing recommendations report. This report provides recommendations on underutilized VMs that could be downgraded to smaller instance types, and it shows what the savings would be if the actions were taken!
The result: Keep VM costs down by sizing them appropriately for their workloads.
Migration assessments
If you’re just getting started with Azure, or are considering moving new workloads, one of the challenges upfront is understanding the costs associated with running that workload in the cloud. The CloudHealth Migration Assessment deliver recommendations of VM types, region and associated projected costs when moving workloads to Azure. This is achieved by deploying a lightweight agent to the machines you want to migrate. CloudHealth analyzes the configuration of the machine and creates the set of recommendations.
The result: Understand your costs and configurations before you start a migration project.
Customizable policies to alert on changes
All of these reports and recommendations are great, but we’re all too busy to analyze charts all day! What if I just want to get alert if something isn’t right in my environment? This is one of the most powerful features of CloudHealth, the ability to write policies across the cost, usage, configuration, or performance of your cloud assets and define actions that should take place if these conditions arise. Here are four must-have policies that we recommend for all our Azure customers:
- Maintain governance: Notify me if an Azure VMs or Resource Groups are untagged.
- Stay ahead of cost spikes: Notify me if my Azure VM costs unexpected increase
- Always know your burndown balance: Notify me if the the balance on my Azure commitment is less than $5,000
- Identify underutilized Azure VMs: Notify me when any resource in a certain subscription is less than 15% utilized in memory AND disk for 24 hours OR less than 15% file system utilized.
The result: Manage your cloud by exception, stay ahead of changes and ensure they don’t cause unexpected results.
Ready to get started? Sign up for a demo today and see what CloudHealth can do in your Azure environment.
